“Web forms are a transaction. You need to look at them as an exchange of information and value in exchange for something of value you promise in your offer. When you don’t look at it as an exchange you fail.”

Many of the tips in this article will help you optimize your checkout page. However, here are a few to get you going based on Bryan’s advice:

Allow your visitors to checkout as a guest without creating an account to reduce friction.

Show trust badges, such as McAfee Secure, to reduce fear and build trust.

Display cart details throughout your store to reinforce the benefits (more on this later).

#3: Show all charges at all times

Just as you shouldn’t surprise customers with high shipping rates, you shouldn’t surprise them with massive fees, either.

The biggest surprise fee is taxes.

While everyone knows intuitively that they’ll probably need to pay taxes on an item, the actual sum might surprise us. Despite knowing we need to pay it, we still sometimes don’t expect it.

The easiest fix for this problem?

Install a sales tax calculator. If you can’t do that, then just include a sentence in your product description stating that tax will be calculated at checkout to give people a reminder.

#4: Provide amazing customer service for 11% more sales

Customer service is your secret weapon.

For you Harry Potter fans, it’s like the sword of Gryffindor - It comes out just in time to give you an edge (pun totally intended) over your competition.

What does customer service have to do with abandoned carts? Check this out...

A 2013 study by customer service software Groove asked 1,500+ companies what channel they’re investing the most in. Of the 7% of respondents who answered “Customer Service”, their conversions were an average of 11% higher than everyone else in the study.

While it’s sad that only 7% were investing in their customer service, the numbers don’t lie.

Just look at Zappos - their core competency is their customer service and they’ve become the biggest shoe retailer of all time. And they have a hell of a good time doing it.

If you’re ready to get serious about customer reviews, our partners YotPo wrote a comprehensive guide on how to get more reviews.

#7: Make it easy to checkout from every page

When people shop online, it’s typically the same as how they shop in-store (for the most part): Random and erratic.

They might bounce around from item to item and category to category, checking out things they might want.

Just as some big box retailers offer multiple checkout locations near exits to the store for customer convenience, so too should you make it convenient for your shoppers to quickly checkout.

For example, Schwood Shop shows this screen when you hit the cart button in the top right:

They literally say, “We’re gonna get you out of here real quick”.

While I don’t necessarily recommend saying that, two things I like about this feature are the “extra goodies” to increase average cart size and the phone number in the top right to build trust.

(Although, I would fix the “+ ADD TO CART” button so it wasn’t half on the image.)

Another thing you can do to make the checkout process easier is to have a popup like the one below come up after a visitor adds something to their cart. That way, they can choose whether they want to checkout or continue shopping.

#8: Give the option to save the cart

Wanna hear something interesting?

A study by Scanalert tracked over 8 million consumers and discovered how long visitors were taking to return to their shopping carts. Take a look at what they found:

The majority of people took more than a day, with many taking more than three days and even more than a week to finish their purchase!

In fact, I’ll bet even reading the words “quick” and “hurry” made your brain slightly more alert. The very words have urgency built into them… and it’s wired into our brains.

Here’s a real life example to prove just how powerful scarcity is…

I read my articles out loud as I edit them. After I read the sentence, “Hurry, only 10 items left in stock, buy now!”, my girlfriend looked at me and said, “Wow, I almost looked at you and said “what, where?!”

Now, when creating your return policy, here are a few things to keep in mind:

The longer the return policy, the more effective it is at getting people to buy. Try to shoot for at least 60, if not 90 days. Zappos has a legendary 365-day return policy. (Sure, the product has to be unopened, but still impressive!)

Offer tiers of return policies. For example, offer a full return if a product is unopened and 75% (or whatever you want) if it was opened.

Make it as painless as possible. Give them a label they can print, slap on a box, and send out. Don’t require the original receipt. The less effort it takes, the happier your customer will be. Remember: Happy customers mean loyal customers.

Offer a cash refund, if possible. While I see the benefit of offering store credit (as it keeps their business with you), it’s much better to not force that upon the customer. Amazon does store credit, but I don’t mind that because you can buy nearly anything there. Unless you're like Amazon, just give them cash back.